Postscript 2: The Tools We Used

As we write ourselves into scholarship on composing with new media, it is imperative that we consider not only how we compose with digital tools, but also how digital tools compose us, our field, our students. To that end, and to our advantage, then, we must attend to the various modes and meanings of our inter/action with interfaces (McCorkle, 2012; Selfe & Selfe, 1994). We must also constantly negotiate an intentional transparency regarding not only the digital tools we use in multimodal composing, but also the multifarious politics of identity and access associated with those tools (e.g., CCCC position statement, 2004), which is why we include this postscript here.

In this postscript, we want to distinguish between the tools we used in our composing process/es (as seen in the videos) from the tools we used to re/present those processes.

In terms of the tools we used to create our videos, we all relied on similar hardware (such as laptops with built-in microphones, smartphones, etc.); however, what we’re most interested in demonstrating here is the diverse constellation of software we implemented. Our various stages of meaning-making are never discrete, but rather reciprocal, inextricable, intertextual. In our processes, for instance, it is thus difficult not only to avoid obscuring the fundamental, non-digital tools we used (such as pen and paper) but also to distinguish between brainstorming, storyboarding, and composing on the one hand and composing videos about our composing on the other.

As individuals, we employed the tools listed below; however, as a team, we also leaned on collaborative technologies offered by email, YouTube, and Google Docs, as discussed in our first postscript. While all of us made use of these tools, a few of us were familiar with HTML coding and working in CSS and created the structure for our webtext. In addition to these digital spaces, we also composed with tools afforded by the physical space of the classroom (equipped with its own ecology of composing tools and politics), which is populated by Mac computers, tables, a projector, and our physical voices and bodies.

Within the lab space, on our individual computers and phones, we used the following tools: